The discursive function of additives in interaction

Abstract

The insertion of additives such as too has been argued to be obligatory (in affirmative sentences) if the immediate context contains a suitable antecedent such that the presupposition triggered by additives is satisfied. However, the obligatoriness of additives has been found to be gradient and their insertion to depend on contextual factors. While most research has focused on comprehension, the present study examines the production of additives and the extent to which they are obligatory by manipulating the factors Similarity and Turn Distance. We furthermore explored whether not using additives even in obligatory environments could be an instance of diverging (i.e. socially distancing) from the antecedent speaker. For this purpose we investigated whether speakers would omit additives when interacting with an impolite antecedent speaker. Overall, the results of our two experiments suggest that (i) in line with previous results on similarity, speakers tend to utter additives more frequently when their utterance’s content more closely matches the content of a previously formulated utterance; and (ii) speakers use additives more frequently when the matching utterance directly precedes their utterance. Furthermore, the results of experiment II suggest that (iii) speakers deliberately drop the use of additives when doing so would allow them to signal divergence from an impolite speaker. Our findings lend support to models in which speakers use additives as a discourse managing tool to organise the discourse and maintain discourse coherence.